My first laptop was an IBM Thinkpad, Later I had some at work. But after they sold to Lenovo, and the Superfish and Lenovo Service Engine issues were discovered, I wrote them off. Thinkpads may be the best non-Apple laptops, but I simply don’t trust Lenovo and likely never will.
I mean, my company buys them, I know at least one other that does too. Both are too technical I think to bother with a hardware support contract. But others might!
When I was in high school, I got hit head on by a car while walking. It wasn’t going fast but I got thrown 1-2 feet in the air and landed hard on my backpack.
Both my Thinkpad and I (thanks to my Thinkpad) were totally fine, and I continued to use it for 4 more years.
One of the last to fall to the 'clickpad' trend. Soon nobody will remember a time of serviceable laptop touchpads with physical buttons where you could precisely and efficiently accomplish real work; a time before the ubiquitous featureless expanse of a clickpad where erratic drivers reduce your interface to vague suggestions to the OS. What's the point of laptops if we have to plug in an external mouse anyway?
* Extended waranty and support with onsite fix 3 year
* Accidental damage insurance. 3 year
Get it all and consider that the ticket price. Then divide by 36 for the monthly SaaS-like price. Makes claude code seem cheap :)
I found it is worth it.
Especially as the home visit means no backup reinstall needed for many fixes, unless it is a full replacement. Such a time saver. And laptops are fragile. They need repair by default (think like a car not like a house double brick wall).
For reasons unknown online technology forums have always had some kind of "underdog" that they cheer for. When the iPhone came out it was Nokia (which had a capacitive touch screen that Apple were just copying), with the Macbook it was the Thinkpad (Apple weren't making devices for real engineers because they didn't have the mousenubbin thing), Nvidia's Linux drivers were garbage (AMD is so much better because it's open source). Some kind of tech hipsterism drives this. But a lot of these proponents were just suffering under inferior tech. I know because I made the mistake of trusting them far too often and then switching to the mainstream thing and finding out that it was really freaking good.
The iPhone is pretty awesome, my Nvidia cards work way better under proprietary drivers on Linux than my AMD cards worked under either OSS or proprietary drivers, and the Macbooks are fantastic hardware. I got scammed by these tech hipsters.
I choose the underdog because it yeilds a better experience when it works. And when it doesn't work, it's my fault. I vastly prefer a thing to be broken because I didn't use it right over a thing being broken because some meaningless and unremembered executive vice under-assistant needed a number to go up in their corporate employee records.
(Pre-Elop) Nokia fan here. The S40 devices were awesome, sturdy, trusty tools.
Smartphones today are light-years more capable, but the constant churn, treating users like idiots, and the incidental complexity of modern phones leave much to be desired.
> There is something “special” about Thinkpads. It’s rare for such a long tradition of design and engineering to be allowed to continue inside mega-companies...
Not... really? They're mega-companies because of deliberate choices like that. Those choices are not the only way to get there, but they've found choices that work. I get that it's trendy to shit on successful businesses and be toxic about the crumbs you enjoy, but it's plain ignorant to call these things "accidents" or "coincidences" and nobody is forcing you to eat crumbs.
The later comparison to Apple is just as strange. Consumers aren't so particular and will buy anything at any price for almost no reason but marketing. All those people hyping Thinkpads may not be the original manufacturer, but they are selling them on eBay and effectively the vendors. They hype old Macs just the same.
I've been thinking of creating a website to make it much easier to search for used thinkpads and sort by various specs. There used to be a similar website like it for servers that's long shut down.
I'll take a good trackpoint + three buttons below space bar over any and all trackpads. Can't stand using them.
Of course I also have separate thinkpad trackpoint II keyboard and a good mouse to use when on a stationary desktop - they're easy to carry along, too.
Great read. There is something special here that the author isn’t commenting on: the fact that cold hard business logic was allowed to lead to a sustainably (money-wise) better product without interference for decades is unusual.
Too often cold hard business logic is subverted by psychopathic short term executive thinking that says “we’re spending money on something good for the customer? I don’t care that it’s also good for us but I like the idea of a quarterly earnings report that doesn’t include that expense!”
The executive then takes their bonus and gets headhunted by the next F500 company where they apply the same strategy.
The repairability and durability arguments should apply to HP and Dell business laptops as well, but they largely don't.
If I were getting a new laptop, I'd probably buy a Mac. But if I needed a Windows laptop, I'd buy a Thinkpad (one is currently my only Windows PC). It's not really upgradeable or modular (fixed RAM, SSD and battery not easy to change), but it is well-built and still pretty snappy despite being 6-7 years old.
The trackpoint alone makes a thinkpad so comfortable to accurately and quickly get a lot done on for mouse workflows when no external mouse is attached, that nothing else comes close.
The reasons I buy second hand thinkpads, is because I have expectations about the keyboard, and they're usually met.
I have expectations about the screen not being silly DPI and 'reasonable', and that's usually met too.
Bluetooth etc. works just fine.
Finally I have expectations on the fans not being like a total joke on most windows laptops... and that's usually fine too.
For the rest I want compatibility; lack of 'FML quirks'.
If only they could fix the absolute turd of audio quality in thinkpads, I think we'd be on par with Apple from my perspective. Although I've loved ARM processors lately and would always prefer a portable ARM machine than Intel.
Choosing thinkpads is really mostly about choosing the boring option, with the least amount of surprises, the dad option of laptops in a sea of disappointments.
At least all expensive laptops of the last 5 years or so seem to have really nice headphone outputs. 10ish years ago, Thinkpads even had bad sound quality on that (but Dell Latitudes were great).
I now have a laptop that supposedly has some of the best speakers on a non-Apple laptop, but guess what, it's a laptop, so it can't possibly reproduce even moderately low frequencies well. So, eh, the emergency sound option is less crap. I don't care too much.
As a 20-something the writer wouldn't have even been a teenager yet when what was regarded as the golden era of second-hand ThinkPads was in swing.
>It’s rare for those teams of people to survive buyouts by foreign companies with their agency and independence intact.
ThinkPad enthusiasts were very vocal about how the Lenovo takeover impaired their later designs (200 and onwards).
I've always found it amusing to see the modern wave of people hyping ThinkPads as recent as the t480; which I've known greybeards to consider having no more in common with a "true" ThinkPad than name and colour scheme.
Yeah, the thinkpad culture really changed their tune. Or maybe it's the second generation thinkpad nerds. Wither way the t400 and t500 series are now widely regarded as the best 2010s era thinkpads you can buy. (I have two T530, one upgraded way beyond stock)
I have a 2020 Lenovo Legion and boy, those things last. I can easily open it to clean it (did it last month), add/remove memory or storage without specialized tools or software. All that I need is built into the bios (like disable battery for service, disable hybrid Intel Graphics/Nvidia to use just the GPU, disable secure boot), and the bios is still getting updates. I understand the price tag, especially for enterprise because every big manufacturer does this.
This is weird and I cant believe it was written in the year of our lord two thousand twenty six.
>Lenovo does not care about you.
>IBM did not care about you.
No shit.
>that IBM and Lenovo are the most kind, gracious corporations in the universe
I have never encountered this line of thought in the thinkpad enthusiast space. People like the design, not the company.
>when most of the laptops they worship were made less than ten years ago
The gold high standard in the Thinkpad enthusiast community was still the T60 last I checked. Released like 2006. I have a T61p at home for my own amusement. And you can still get bootleg parts like batteries.
>Simply put, because they have not thought for one second about a Thinkpad in any other context than their home, let alone about the general functioning of computers in a business setting…
No of course not. Because they like the design. If I could get myself a Cray 1 I would. I dont care about the business context.
>old laptops are disposed of, and treated basically as garbage.
No, what happens is that the finance/leasing company contracts someone to assess the current state of the hardware. Anything that's missing or severely damaged is billable to the lessor. Then what was turned over to the recyclers is sold on with a cut going back to the finance firm.
Some basic research here would have actually strengthened your core premise, because they get a small tasty bite of the secondary market.
>Thinkpads are Repairable because every minute of a field technician’s labor costs money for IBM/Lenovo, and cuts into the profit made on a service contract
Yes exactly. But this isnt the only business model available. Some businesses make laptops that are less repairable, or dont last as long. Nobody thinks the company wants to marry them. But in a marketplace you choose the product that closely aligns with your parameters. It doesnt matter why the company used those parameters.
>Notice, that nowhere in this explanation did I say “used to”, “once were” or “back then”. Because this cycle is continuous.
Oh no, you are telling me that they are continuing to make repairable laptops? Thats terrible. How will the thinkpad community ever recover.
>These are not magical virtues of a bygone age. These things aren’t even really “virtuous” at least in terms of motivation. Lenovo doesn’t care about “Right to Repair” any more than Apple, they just sell to a different market, and make their money in a different way.
I honestly see people clamoring for computers from specifically before Intel Management Engine\TPM\Secure Boot more than a vague mysterious bygone age.
>They’re typical companies, who just happen to have some good designers and engineers.
No shit. But this is true about every piece of hardware that has a fandom. Its no different in a Porsche group. Or people going on about old Cisco switches. Theres nothing new here. I dont think that JVC wanted to make beautiful love to me because I enjoy the design of the Videosphere.
>But Thinkpads didn’t materialize out of the virtuous ether
Thinkpads get eight or nine for repairabliity from ifixit while Macbooks get a four or five, basically because of storage replacability [1]. The pentalobe screw issue is moot for anyone with a spare $5.
Apple could easily fix this. Macs are generally good value except for the absolute rip-off that is storage. $400 to go from 1TB to 2TB is a ridiculous markup.
The only time I had something bad was one model that it has issues when powering, which I never tracked down if the root cause was the hardware itself or a driver issue.
The only other brand I have been as lucky were Asus multimedia laptops, and netbooks.
44 comments
[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 59.4 ms ] threadI mean, my company buys them, I know at least one other that does too. Both are too technical I think to bother with a hardware support contract. But others might!
Both my Thinkpad and I (thanks to my Thinkpad) were totally fine, and I continued to use it for 4 more years.
* Laptop price
* Extended waranty and support with onsite fix 3 year
* Accidental damage insurance. 3 year
Get it all and consider that the ticket price. Then divide by 36 for the monthly SaaS-like price. Makes claude code seem cheap :)
I found it is worth it.
Especially as the home visit means no backup reinstall needed for many fixes, unless it is a full replacement. Such a time saver. And laptops are fragile. They need repair by default (think like a car not like a house double brick wall).
The iPhone is pretty awesome, my Nvidia cards work way better under proprietary drivers on Linux than my AMD cards worked under either OSS or proprietary drivers, and the Macbooks are fantastic hardware. I got scammed by these tech hipsters.
(Pre-Elop) Nokia fan here. The S40 devices were awesome, sturdy, trusty tools.
Smartphones today are light-years more capable, but the constant churn, treating users like idiots, and the incidental complexity of modern phones leave much to be desired.
Not... really? They're mega-companies because of deliberate choices like that. Those choices are not the only way to get there, but they've found choices that work. I get that it's trendy to shit on successful businesses and be toxic about the crumbs you enjoy, but it's plain ignorant to call these things "accidents" or "coincidences" and nobody is forcing you to eat crumbs.
The later comparison to Apple is just as strange. Consumers aren't so particular and will buy anything at any price for almost no reason but marketing. All those people hyping Thinkpads may not be the original manufacturer, but they are selling them on eBay and effectively the vendors. They hype old Macs just the same.
Too often cold hard business logic is subverted by psychopathic short term executive thinking that says “we’re spending money on something good for the customer? I don’t care that it’s also good for us but I like the idea of a quarterly earnings report that doesn’t include that expense!”
The executive then takes their bonus and gets headhunted by the next F500 company where they apply the same strategy.
Dell laptops must have one available.
The main argument is that thinkpads are high quality because it makes the service contract cheaper for Lenovo to fulfill.
But other non-repairable/poor quality brands thrives in the same market segment.
If I were getting a new laptop, I'd probably buy a Mac. But if I needed a Windows laptop, I'd buy a Thinkpad (one is currently my only Windows PC). It's not really upgradeable or modular (fixed RAM, SSD and battery not easy to change), but it is well-built and still pretty snappy despite being 6-7 years old.
I have expectations about the screen not being silly DPI and 'reasonable', and that's usually met too.
Bluetooth etc. works just fine.
Finally I have expectations on the fans not being like a total joke on most windows laptops... and that's usually fine too.
For the rest I want compatibility; lack of 'FML quirks'.
If only they could fix the absolute turd of audio quality in thinkpads, I think we'd be on par with Apple from my perspective. Although I've loved ARM processors lately and would always prefer a portable ARM machine than Intel.
Choosing thinkpads is really mostly about choosing the boring option, with the least amount of surprises, the dad option of laptops in a sea of disappointments.
I now have a laptop that supposedly has some of the best speakers on a non-Apple laptop, but guess what, it's a laptop, so it can't possibly reproduce even moderately low frequencies well. So, eh, the emergency sound option is less crap. I don't care too much.
most wrong statement ever.
in fact with the entire 30th anniversary lineup was made to sell new units to fans, no one else cared.
>It’s rare for those teams of people to survive buyouts by foreign companies with their agency and independence intact.
ThinkPad enthusiasts were very vocal about how the Lenovo takeover impaired their later designs (200 and onwards).
I've always found it amusing to see the modern wave of people hyping ThinkPads as recent as the t480; which I've known greybeards to consider having no more in common with a "true" ThinkPad than name and colour scheme.
that's the entire reason.
no need to get into supply chains and culture and hoodoo.
>Lenovo does not care about you. >IBM did not care about you.
No shit.
>that IBM and Lenovo are the most kind, gracious corporations in the universe
I have never encountered this line of thought in the thinkpad enthusiast space. People like the design, not the company.
>when most of the laptops they worship were made less than ten years ago
The gold high standard in the Thinkpad enthusiast community was still the T60 last I checked. Released like 2006. I have a T61p at home for my own amusement. And you can still get bootleg parts like batteries.
>Simply put, because they have not thought for one second about a Thinkpad in any other context than their home, let alone about the general functioning of computers in a business setting…
No of course not. Because they like the design. If I could get myself a Cray 1 I would. I dont care about the business context.
>old laptops are disposed of, and treated basically as garbage.
No, what happens is that the finance/leasing company contracts someone to assess the current state of the hardware. Anything that's missing or severely damaged is billable to the lessor. Then what was turned over to the recyclers is sold on with a cut going back to the finance firm.
Some basic research here would have actually strengthened your core premise, because they get a small tasty bite of the secondary market.
>Thinkpads are Repairable because every minute of a field technician’s labor costs money for IBM/Lenovo, and cuts into the profit made on a service contract
Yes exactly. But this isnt the only business model available. Some businesses make laptops that are less repairable, or dont last as long. Nobody thinks the company wants to marry them. But in a marketplace you choose the product that closely aligns with your parameters. It doesnt matter why the company used those parameters.
>Notice, that nowhere in this explanation did I say “used to”, “once were” or “back then”. Because this cycle is continuous.
Oh no, you are telling me that they are continuing to make repairable laptops? Thats terrible. How will the thinkpad community ever recover.
>These are not magical virtues of a bygone age. These things aren’t even really “virtuous” at least in terms of motivation. Lenovo doesn’t care about “Right to Repair” any more than Apple, they just sell to a different market, and make their money in a different way.
I honestly see people clamoring for computers from specifically before Intel Management Engine\TPM\Secure Boot more than a vague mysterious bygone age.
>They’re typical companies, who just happen to have some good designers and engineers.
No shit. But this is true about every piece of hardware that has a fandom. Its no different in a Porsche group. Or people going on about old Cisco switches. Theres nothing new here. I dont think that JVC wanted to make beautiful love to me because I enjoy the design of the Videosphere.
>But Thinkpads didn’t materialize out of the virtuous ether
And no one claims they did.
>But don’t treat these things like they’re magic
No one does.
Apple could easily fix this. Macs are generally good value except for the absolute rip-off that is storage. $400 to go from 1TB to 2TB is a ridiculous markup.
[1] https://www.ifixit.com/repairability/laptop-repairability-sc...
The only time I had something bad was one model that it has issues when powering, which I never tracked down if the root cause was the hardware itself or a driver issue.
The only other brand I have been as lucky were Asus multimedia laptops, and netbooks.